In May 2016, this site published one of the most unfortunately prescient articles in its history. It didn’t actually use the words “woke” or “cancelled”, which weren’t yet in common parlance, but its purpose was very much to warn of the puritan, censorious, hyper-intolerant and catastrophically destructive culture they came to embody.
At the time Nicola Sturgeon had only been First Minister for a year and a half and there were few signs that she was that movement’s commander – or, those inclined to a more charitable outlook than us might posit, its prisoner. It would be two more years before she detonated the bomb that really shattered the unity of the Yes movement when she attempted to fit up Alex Salmond over fake allegations of sexual assaults.
But last night and this morning I was struck by an unexpected pang of pity for the fanatical, fundamentalist Twitler Youth rainbow stormtroopers who make up Sturgeon’s ideological frontline. Sympathy for the little devils, you might say.
And since it’s a somewhat rare feeling, it seemed worth a little exploration.
I am living for the day when someone in the Scottish media finds some courage from somewhere and asks Nicola Sturgeon, because she’s going to blink so fast her face might catch fire. But that phone will just keep on ringing until someone answers.
For a number of years now, Twitter has been an unmitigated force for evil – a barely-disguised attempt at mass social engineering on a scale unprecedented since the Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels, undertaken by an unelected, unaccountable global corporation (it doesn’t even have a published address in the UK, either physical or digital, something I can’t believe is legal).
Attempts have been made at creating an alternative, including Parler and various branches of a protocol called Mastodon, but they’ve all been terrible. The latest effort, Gettr, looks a lot more promising. Available on the web or as free iOS and Android apps, it works exactly like Twitter, except that you get 777 characters instead of 280 – the interfaces are so similar you could easily forget which you were using.
(Because communications platforms are neutral by default, even if people you don’t agree with are allowed to use them too. Hitler loved trains, that doesn’t make you a Nazi if you get on one. We don’t boycott the seaside just because Stalin had a beach house and you don’t have to follow or listen to any of the right-wing people on Gettr just because they’re there.)
It plainly doesn’t yet have the breadth of Twitter – because most of those signing up so far have specific political agendas of various sorts, rather than being people who just like posting cute pictures of their cats and whatnot – but it’s hit 1.5m users in 11 days, something that took Twitter more than two years, so that could change quickly.
There’s also no guarantee that it won’t become just as evil as Twitter, of course, but for now it seems worth giving it the benefit of the doubt if you like the idea of social media but don’t want to get instantly banned and/or witch-hunted to death if any of your views diverge in the tiniest possible way from those of the hyper-intolerant Twitler Youth who have somehow captured most of Scottish and UK politics. Maybe see you there.
We’re assuming, naturally, that the First Minister will be duly suspended from the SNP while these shocking allegations are fully investigated, just like Gareth Wardell, Denise Findlay, Neale Hanvey, Mark McDonald, Michelle Thomson, Neil Hay, etc etc etc were.
We’re not, of course. And nor should she be, because “shared a platform with” is the ugly ginger stepchild of fake-outrage cancel culture – lower on the smear scale even than “liked a tweet by” or “linked an article by someone who completely separately had an unfashionable opinion on a completely different subject several years ago”. It’s absolute guff punted only by scumbags.
Nevertheless, the uncomfortable fact is that those are precisely the crimes for which other people WERE suspended and/or ostracised from the party, and we can’t help wishing the SNP’s flagrant hypocrisy about it was just a little bit less obvious and less arrogantly blatant, so that it wasn’t quite so painfully offensive to any decent person, and so that we weren’t having to fight quite so hard to keep believing in independence when we see the grim state of the Scotland that’s taking shape before our eyes.
Two weeks ago a Wings scoop caused quite a furore to erupt around the SNP’s ham-fisted and corruptly-motivated attempts to increase BAME and disabled representation at this year’s Holyrood election.
We’ve always been opposed to what were until recently known as “quotas”, and prior to that “positive discrimination”, but have now been cunningly rebranded as “diversity and inclusion” because that’s a much more difficult thing to say you object to.
It’s easy to make an honourable-sounding case against any form of “discrimination”, because decent and civilised people are taught to automatically think of discrimination as a bad thing, even if you put “positive” in front of it.
So the word “quotas” was adopted to move the concept from a pejorative term to a neutral noun – objecting to “quotas” doesn’t sound intolerant, any more than objecting to (say) “procedures” does. So that’s fine, because you can still discuss it like adults without too much unpleasantness.
But those pushing the agenda got smarter still by changing the name again. If you say you object to “diversity and inclusion”, you sound like a monster and a racist, because diversity and inclusion are plainly good things – no decent person wants to live in a monoculture, or to exclude anybody from society – and so the debate is immediately drowned out by self-righteous tossers screaming “BIGOT!” and “NAZI!” at everyone.
And yet in the context of social policy the three phrases mean the exact same thing. They’re all systems for overriding raw democracy so as to increase the representation of selected groups at the expense of other groups, for one reason or another.
(Sometimes it’s ostensibly just penance for historical wrongs, while at other times it’s supposedly for economic benefits, and so on.)
And while the proponents of those systems will openly argue that the only group being disadvantaged is straight white men so it’s all fine (because nobody likes straight white men and anyone standing up for them can be easily dismissed as a “gammon” for lots of woke points and Twitter likes), it isn’t even remotely close to the truth.
Because in “diversity and inclusion”, some groups are a lot more included than others.
There’s been a very longstanding grumble from independence supporters about the way the BBC displays its weather map, but today we saw a bit of footage from the UK general election a year ago this week that depicts the Corporation’s view of the country more truthfully than ever before. We thought we’d share it with you for fun.
Screw your eyes up a bit and you can still just about see where you are.
Television’s transforming before our eyes, as both what we watch and how we watch it changes. An ever-greater number of programmes shown through increasing mediums. But that doesn’t equate to balanced political coverage being provided, quality product displayed, or distinct countries reflected.
The United States, despite the great wealth and talent available to it in Hollywood and elsewhere, is the worse for the absence of a properly funded and high quality public broadcasting service. Its society is the poorer and its democracy badly distorted by its absence. It’s why Scotland needs a properly funded public broadcaster.
The battle to save the soul of the SNP – formerly a party of Scottish independence but now a career vehicle for intolerant science-denying cultists solely interested in social engineering – is already almost lost.
By delaying its online pretend “conference” until the end of November, the party has ensured that the chronically dysfunctional current National Executive Committee (NEC) controls the selection of candidates for next year’s election, and it’s using that power every bit as crookedly as anyone who’s been paying attention recently might fear.
Following the stitch-up of Joanna Cherry, the latest victim of the SNP’s woke cabal is Caroline McAllister, a woman who the party considers quite fit to be a councillor – and indeed the Deputy Leader of its group on West Dunbartonshire council – but who has suddenly somehow become unacceptable when she tried to seek nomination for the MSP seat currently held by Jackie Baillie of Scottish Labour.
